There is a growing demand for software companies to produce reliable, defect-free software. While the causes of software defects are varied, a significant proportion of errors are caused during the software development stage by a poor collective understanding of project status and of fellow team member activities.
Software programmers spend significant time gaining and maintaining awareness of fellow developers' activities. Unlike other collaborative jobs where workers can observe each others' activities as they physically move and perform actions within their shared workspace, programmers use electronic tools to operate in a shared virtual environment where other programmers' activities are difficult (or even impossible) to observe directly. This significantly increases the effort for programmers to gain and maintain an awareness of how their workspace is changing.
Many software development teams leverage innovative methodologies to increase awareness and cooperation among programmers. These methodologies increase awareness and team interaction by employing shortened, highly iterative development cycles and co-locating programmers in the same physical workspace. However, programmers still lack adequate tools to support sufficient ongoing awareness of other group members' actions. For example, even with the methodologies currently in use, key pieces of awareness information (such as who is working with which source files) are difficult to determine.
Several tools have been created to enhance an individual's awareness and understanding of large software shared code bases. One such tool provides a line-based view of the code. Each line of code is mapped to a thin row in a column which represents a code file. Rows are colored to represent a particular attribute of the code line. For example, lines that have recently changed appear red, and blue if they are the least recently changed. Another awareness tool provides miniaturized views of code files that can be arranged spatially. Highlights are shown on the sections of files that the programmer has open in the code editor. Programmers can also click on the thumbnails to navigate within the code base. Yet another awareness tool provides programmers with cumulative information about how fellow developers have navigated a code base in the past. This enables programmers to build on the actions of others, to better understand and navigate the code themselves. However, while these awareness tools focus on improving understanding and navigation of a large code base (such as what files contain which classes and methods, or what sections of code have changed in the past), they are still unable to provide a real-time awareness of fellow team members' activities within the shared code base. For example, these awareness tools cannot indicate who has which file open, or what files are currently being edited.
Another type of awareness tool provides a line-oriented view but combines activity information as one of the visualization attributes. Some awareness tools provide programmers with a per-line level view of activity, which are good for learning specific changes within a single or small set of code files. However, this line-oriented view has difficulty accommodating large code bases.
Another type of awareness tool enables programmers to view a historical evolution of changes for an entire code base. Using a space-filling representation of the code base, the visualization highlights changes using animations of different code snapshots over time. However, these types of awareness tools do not allow programmers to quickly determine and maintain an awareness of the activities currently occurring in the code base or to coordinate the ongoing activities of programmers in a shared code base.
There also are tools that enhance group awareness. Group awareness, which is essential to effective collaboration, is the understanding of who you are working with, what is being worked on, and how your actions affect others. A common method for gaining and maintaining this awareness is through the use of shared artifacts. Several group awareness tools exist that convey status of shared artifacts. Some of these group awareness tools allow collaborators to share views of artifacts currently open on their screens with other collaborators. Other types of group awareness tools extend the capabilities to gain artifact awareness when working within a physical workspace composed of multiple shared and personal devices. Still other types of group awareness tools enable users to collaboratively work inside a shared document workspace. However, these group awareness tools lack a holistic view of the entire shared workspace. In addition, these tools merely replicate a collaborator's local workspace to remote users and do not extract and visualize only key individual activity information that is useful in an overview of workspace activity.